I’ve been asked about this, so here is a quick and dirty reading list on some coaching topics that I have found helpful. (Without any of my usual wit or flowery language.)
Of these, the first two (Language of Coaching and How We Learn To Move) are by far my top picks on coaching resources.
The Language of Coaching: The Art & Science of Teaching Movement
Nick Winkelman
This is a book about the use of external cues in coaching, which is a very powerful and underutilized idea. This doesn’t go into a ton of details about why external is better (more on that lower in the list) but is more of a practical handbook for coaches on how to use the tool. It has a ton of ideas for how to remodel traditional internal cues and instructions into an external format to make it easier for an athlete to actually develop meaningful improvement based on feedback.
How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills
Rob Gray
While the title of this book sounds like someone hawking his too-good-to-be-true miracle cure, this is actually just an amalgamation of the last 100 years of research into motor skills learning. The basic gist is that there is no such thing as an “idealized” motion that you can practice, the same skills are executed slightly differently every time. So training should embrace this, instead of trying to make robots which can execute some platonic ideal of a motion that doesn’t exist in the real world. Rob is a researcher so naturally this is all backed up by a wealth of studies, which are well cited and described through.
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
Ericsson is one of the most important researchers in the field of deliberate practice. That is, the difference between simply doing something and the act of effectively setting up an activity to maximize the skill gains from performing it. This is a great read to help get a better appreciation for the steps that should go into training vs doing, and what the low hanging fruit are to get the most of your training time. Anecdotal personal story of my first hand experience hammering home the importance of deliberate practice, vs just doing:
Once, in my pre-HEMA life, I competed in the World Dragon Boat Festival in Hong Kong. It was a big event with crowds, festivities, and the like. And what would a big sports festival be without an announcer and PA system? Being a high energy announcer seems to be a culture all of its own, and like sports announcers anywhere in the world they were constantly finding things to say to keep the energy up. One of the topics they loved to come back to was how well they predicted the local Hong Kong fishermen could show up all the foreigners. To paraphrase, the announcers were claiming that the local fishermen had a massive advantage over international teams because they were on the water every day paddling their boats around, and had been since they were children. The internationals, in comparison, were typically white-collar workers who trained in their leisure time. What actually happened? The international teams crushed the teams made up of local fishermen, despite all of the announcers’ homerism. This is because the fishermen were spending immeasurably more hours on the water doing, while the international teams were spending their far more limited time training. (There were other Hong Kong teams that trained very seriously, and they were very dominant. Just not the local fishermen ones.)
The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down
Simon Marshall, Lesley Paterson
Probably the most practical book on developing mental skills and resilience I’ve read. Typically books are very clinical in description of psychological training, and don’t show an easy path to application. This book focuses on more concrete examples and uses language which more matches how people actually think and communicate. Which makes it an interesting read and easier for me to understand as an athlete who never really had to deal with these personally, and find it hard to relate to as a coach.
The Warm-Up: Maximize Performance and Improve Long-Term Athletic Development
Ian Jeffreys
This isn’t the most amazing book I’ve ever read, but it tackles a topic that is frequently overlooked. And it’s interesting to see how it ties into the work I’ve been doing over the last two years in making the warm-up a more useful piece of practice time.
tl;dr – don’t make the warm up a useless block of non-specific exercises, make it be focused on fundamental skills
Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training
Tudor Bompa, Carlo Buzzichelli
Probably the most readable sports textbook I’ve encountered. The most comprehensive source I’ve seen to explain training principles like supercompensation, while still being penetrable to someone not wanting to get university credits. The first half will be very valuable to someone who has no background in developing a training program, and understanding how people improve and adapt physiologically. The last half is more focused on periodization itself, which is waaaaay above what any HEMA practitioner should be thinking about at this stage in the development of the tournament scene.
Note that as this is a textbook you can find older editions for much more reasonable prices.
Attention and Motor Skill Learning
Gabriele Wulf
The book of Wulf’s research, which is the basis for the whole “external cue” methodology. A lot of the most salient points are already captured in more practical application based books (like Winkelman), so this is more of a curiosity for people who want to know more of the science behind the principle. Also Wulf is a much better scientist than a writer, it wasn’t a super compelling narrative despite me finding the material fascinating.
The one thing that was interesting was the sections on balance learning through focus on dissimilar tasks, but like everything else in the book it was all theory and no guidance on how to apply it. It also doesn’t come cheap, being an academic book with no older editions.
Motor Learning and Control: Concepts and Applications
Richard Magill & David Anderson
A rather dense textbook about everything you ever wanted to know about how people coordinate their movements and learn new skills. All the underlying concepts that are in books like Winkleman and Gray appear here, and a lot more. Given there is very little context on how to apply concepts, and the writing being dull textbook style, it’s not for the faint of heart. But I found it really interesting.
Because it is a textbook the latest edition is exorbitantly expensive, but since it is on the 12th edition (or something) there are lots of cheaper versions.